ANIMATED CARTOON
Lesson 10
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Let’s figure out how to solve this task in practice.
O
ur next challenge is learning how to ani mate the background and create the effect of changing day and night in the frame.
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CREATING THE ANIMATED BACKGROUND
Figure 1 Figure 2
San Fransokyo is a metropolis with skyscrapers made of glass and metal. Therefore, we will use the art in .png for our project (Figure 2). You can find the image in the Materials folder.
First, we need to choose a location, for example, the futuristic city of San Fransokyo from the computeranimated superhero film “Big Hero 6” (Figure 1).
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4 LESSON 10 Let’s open this image in Paint.NET. We will create a new layer and fill it with a gradient of two shades of dark blue (Figure 3). It is recommended to save this file separately! Name it as the City_template, e. g. This template will be neededLet’sfurther.goback to the main project and merge the layers with the background and the city. Then copy the resulting frame of the night city 4 times. Select the first layer and open the menu Adjustments > Hue/Saturation (see Figure 4 on page 5). Lower the Lightness parameter to -95 (Figure 5). Figure 3
5 Cr EATIN g THE A NIMATED B AC kgrou ND Figure 4 Figure 5
We will do the same with the second and third copies and set their lightness -65 and -35. Leave the lowest initial layer unchanged. As a result, we will get 4 night frames. Open the City_template file and place the layers with the background and the city into our main project.
Let’s start working on the dawn sky. Select a new background layer and open the Adjustments > Brightness / Contrast (Figure 6).
Figure 6
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Increase the Brightness to 40 to make the sky lighter (Figure 7).
It is essential to execute each action not to mix anything up carefully from this step.
7 Cr EATIN g THE A NIMATED B AC kgrou ND Copy the changed background and city for the next frame, and change the sky’s hue. For this, we should open the Hue / Saturation panel and increase the Hue to 50. As a result, the background should be lilac (Figure 8). Figure 7 Figure 8
Figures 9 and 10
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Copy the last two layers and apply the Hue / Saturation to them again. Set the values to lighten the sky, as shown in FigureLet’s9. make the background in blue on the next copied layer, changing the value of the Hue parameter to -55 and the Saturation to 140 (Figure 10).
9 Cr EATIN g THE A NIMATED B AC kgrou ND Our daytime sky is ready! Now you need to change the color of the city itself. To implement it, copy the last version of the background again, select the layer with buildings depicted and open the Hue / Saturation panel. Let’s make the buildings greener and dim. For this, we lower the Hue parameter to -110 and the Saturation to 45 (Figure 11). Add some brightness and contrast to the buildings in the next frame (Figure 12). Figures 11 and 12
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Figures 13 and 14
The third copy of the daytime city can be lightened even more by increasing the Brightness and Contrast (Figure 13). As for a daytime landscape, our city looks too dim. Therefore, we should make it brighter. Create another copy and increase the Saturation value to 140 (Figure 14).
All the basic frames of the city are ready! You can merge all layers with the city and the background in pairs. Now, we have come to the most significant step: duplicating all layers and placing them in reverse order above the last day frame. In such a way, we will loop the change of day and night (Figure 15).
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Figure 15
12 LESSON 10 Let’s extend the day to make our animation more interesting. For the implementation, we need to copy the layer with the daytime city 7-10 times (Figure 16). You can do the same with the brightest night frame. Figure 16
13 Cr EATIN g THE A NIMATED B AC kgrou ND After implementing this step, feel free to save the project in .gif (Video 1). Changing day and night is far from the only effect you can create. To find the inspiration for new ideas, look through the examples of the animated background (see Videos 2 and 3 on page 14). Video 1
14 LESSON 10 Video 2 Video 3
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CrEATINg THE ANIMATED BACKGROUND
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